1.5 Million Missing Numbers: Overcoming Employment Suppression in County Business Patterns Data

Andrew M. Isserman and James Westervelt
Additional contact information
Andrew M. Isserman: Departments of Agricultural and Consumer Economics and Urban and Regional Planning, University of Illinois, Urbana, isserman@uiuc.edu
James Westervelt: Engineer Research and Development Center, Army Corps of Engineers, Champaign, IL, james.d.westervelt@ERDC.usace.army.mil

International Regional Science Review, 2006, vol. 29, issue 3, 311-335

Abstract: Missing data frustrate research and limit our understanding of regional economies. County Business Patterns annually provides employment data for all U.S. counties and states at the most detailed industrial level, but two out of every three employment statistics are missing. In rural areas, this percentage is higher still. To protect the rights of employers to confidentiality, the U.S. Census Bureau has not disclosed the number of employees in 1.5 million cases in the 2002 data. Instead, it offers a suppression flag that represents an employment range. This article presents a two-stage method for replacing all the flags with employment estimates. Taking advantage of the hierarchical nature of the data both by industry and geography, the first stage identifies the smallest possible range for each suppressed number. Ensuring that employment adds up correctly up and down the industrial and geographical hierarchies, the second stage iteratively adjusts all the estimates until millions of constraints are met. The procedure simultaneously considers all industries in all counties, states, and the nation to produce a complete data set, which is available to the research community on the Internet.

Keywords: employment data; county data; data confidentiality; suppression; estimation; regional analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2006
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (19)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0160017606290359 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:inrsre:v:29:y:2006:i:3:p:311-335

DOI: 10.1177/0160017606290359

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in International Regional Science Review
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().